A Director With an Eye for Art Tries Video Portraits

By ALAN RIDING

Published: November 26, 2004

Robert Wilson's stagecraft has always been known for his painterly use of light and color, so much so that his opera and theater productions often resemble tableaux vivants. Now Mr. Wilson, the Texas-born avant-garde director, has taken a further step toward art by ''painting'' portraits -- so far of celebrities like Brad Pitt and Winona Ryder -- in the new medium of high-definition television.

These are not, however, frozen images. Rather, the filmed portraits, intended to run 3 to 12 minutes as a continuous loop, show Mr. Wilson's subjects to be alive, but barely moving. The works were originally commissioned for broadcast on television, but Mr. Wilson also imagines them displayed on life-size screens in homes, galleries or museums.

''The idea is that when you look at it at first, there's no movement,'' he explained while visiting Paris this week to create portraits of three leading French actresses, Jeanne Moreau, Isabelle Huppert and Juliette Binoche. ''But after a while you can see some little movement. It's like a still life that is a real life.''

What gives these portraits Mr. Wilson's look is that they are staged. As with his work in opera and theater, where his actors move with stylized slowness, Mr. Wilson controls every tiny movement in the portraits as part of a meticulous choreography. Before each portrait, he also spends hours working out the lighting and color. And, finally, he transforms his subject with costume and make-up in a manner evocative of Cindy Sherman's self-portraits.

Thus the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov is depicted peppered with arrows as the martyred St. Sebastian. The Chinese artist Zhang Huan stands motionless as butterflies swarm around him. Mr. Pitt is portrayed bare-chested in the pouring rain. And Ms. Ryder appears as the main character in Beckett's play ''Happy Days,'' wearing a Carmen Miranda headdress and seemingly buried up to her neck in sand.

For Mr. Wilson, the idea of working in art is certainly no novelty. His drawings for sets and costumes, for instance, are frequently shown in galleries. In the 1970's, he also created a series of 30-second video portraits. But only with the arrival of high-definition video were painterly portraits possible. And when LAB, a channel owned by the satellite television service Voom, invited him to collaborate on a project, he grabbed the chance. Starting this spring, LAB will broadcast one portrait a week in a one-hour loop. Simultaneously, the portraits will be shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.

To suit the different markets, each portrait is made in vertical and horizontal versions, similar but not identical. Of the four vertical copies, one will be donated to the portrait's subject; a second will become part of the collection at Mr. Wilson's Watermill Center at Water Mill, N.Y.; and two will be sold. The horizontal version made for television may in turn be resold for other uses -- in, say, a designer restaurant -- after it is broadcast.

For the moment, though, the Robert Wilson Video Portrait Project is still a work in progress. The subjects of the 10 portraits done in the United States this year also include Marianne Faithfull (as a character from ''The Black Rider,'' a show created in 1990 by Mr. Wilson with Tom Waits and William Burroughs), Steve Buscemi (as a mad butcher), Alan Cumming (as a drag queen) and Robert Downey Jr. (as the corpse in Rembrandt's ''Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp''). But Mr. Wilson and his team keep looking for candidates.

''Do you know Johnny Depp?'' the director asked Ms. Huppert when she arrived in a studio outside Paris on Wednesday evening for her portrait. ''We've been trying to reach him. I hear he's shooting in London.'' Mr. Huppert offered to call a friend who was close to Mr. Depp.

Earlier in the day, working from a copy of a full-length portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, Mr. Wilson had turned Ms. Moreau, the grande dame of French cinema, into a convincing copy of the ill-fated Scottish monarch. Now, as Ms. Moreau's almost-immobile image presided over Mr. Wilson's working space, Ms. Huppert prepared to recreate two famous photographs of Greta Garbo by Edward Steichen.

Ms. Huppert, who appeared in Mr. Wilson's production of an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's ''Orlando'' in the 1990's, discovered she would ''become'' Garbo only when she arrived here, but she was delighted with the choice. Mr. Wilson thought it was obvious. ''Isabelle has always reminded me physically of Garbo,'' he said, ''the bones, the structure of the face, the eyes.''

Finally, with red lipstick and flowing hair, Ms. Huppert took up Steichen's position of Garbo leaning languorously across a settee. From the darkness, Mr. Wilson used a microphone to guide her: ''Eyes closed. Now open them very slowly so we don't see them opening, very sleepy, wider, wider, then slowly let them close.'' He paused for 15 seconds then continued: ''Your left hand, the finger closest to your thumb, lift it slowly, higher. Now stop.''

After 40 minutes, the recording was repeated for the horizontal version. Then, re-enacting another Steichen portrait of Garbo, a close-up with the star holding her face in gloved hands, Ms. Huppert again went through the ritual, this time moving little more than her eyes as Mr. Wilson signaled his instructions across the dark studio.

''She was wonderful, tireless,'' Mr. Wilson said today as he returned to the studio to create Ms. Binoche's portrait in a setting evocative of a film noir. ''Isabelle is the first time we've done two completely different portraits. We'll see if we use both when it comes to editing.''

He said he had already been approached by collectors eager to commission portraits, but for the moment his team is focusing on actors because they are more used to performing. But not all, it seems, are ready to be transformed.

''I wanted to do Sean Penn as a Rembrandt,'' Mr. Wilson noted. ''But he said: 'That's not me. I have Sean Penn as Sean Penn.' He said, 'I am who I am, and I'm not anyone else.' 'So be Sean Penn,' I said. We'll do him and just give him a cigarette.''

Photo: Robert Wilson with the actress Isabelle Huppert. Under his direction, Ms. Huppert recreated two photographs of Greta Garbo. (Photo by Pavel Antonov courtesy of R.W.Work/LAB)